How to Set up Google Analytics for your Website the Correct Way

If you have answered yes, then you need to set up some sort of tracking tool to make the most out of your visitors!

How else will you know where your visitors are coming from or how they are interacting with your “great” content? 🙂

The key to a great website is to always know what your prospects are interested in and what they are looking for. You might deem something as ‘good’ information, but your readers or potential customers may not necessarily agree with you.

So you need to collect data on which pages they like to linger or which pages are closed within a second. This is valuable data because you can then tweak the content of your page to suit your targeted audience.

It should be the very first site that appears, if not Google fails at SEO! [su_animate type=”wobble” duration=”4″]hahahaha[/su_animate] 🙂

To access the tracking tool, you’ll need a Google account, you know… the same one you use for Google Keyword Planner.

If not, you can simply create a new one by clicking on ‘Create an account’ at the top of the page.

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Once you’ve signed in, you’ll need to sign up again by clicking on ‘Sign Up‘. Yep, you need to sign up to every one of Google’s Products (tedious work I know, but well worth it. Plus, it doesn’t take very long).

Here is where you’ll have to insert some of your website’s basic information. Stuff like account name, website name, URL, Industry Category (optional), Reporting time zones and privacy settings and so on.

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As soon as you fill all of that out, move on to generate your tracking ID (in case you missed it, it’s the blue ‘Get Tracking ID’ button at the bottom).

There will be a pop up with their terms and service conditions. As always make sure you read through it (but seriously… who does?) and then click on ‘Agree’.

The following page is your very own tracking code, which may look like something from the Matrix (i.e. confusing non-sense). That’s how I see it anyway. 🙂

This funny looking piece of code needs to be placed somewhere within your website so that Google can start tracking your visitors. So you’ll need to be able to access your website’s back office (or source code) so you can do this.

This might seem daunting for some people (trust me I used to be one of them), but it’s actually quite easy.

Just a heads up, I’ll only being showing you how to install it on a WordPress site.

First, let’s talk about the plugin. There are a few plugins out there that will help you with this process and all that is required is to copy and paste your tracking ID which is shown in the blue box above, including the UA. Please don’t copy the code above! That’s my code. Yours will look very similar, so get your own one! 🙂

Now, if you don’t want to download a plugin then you can simply add the piece of tracking code to your website’s header yourself. Follow the steps below so you don’t get lost:

1. Copy YOUR tracking code which looks somewhat similar to the one in the red box. It should start with <script> and end with </script>.

2. Head over to your WordPress dashboard and under ‘Appearance‘, click on ‘Editor‘.

3. On the right side, under ‘Templates’, look for ‘header.php‘ and click on to it.

4. Look for the code </head> and paste the code on top of that

5. Press update and your done!

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Once you have followed the steps above and completed it, it may take Google Analytics several hours to pick up your code and start tracking your data. You will see your tracking status as ‘receiving data’ once it’s connected.